Saturday, June 17, 2017

Mazzino Montinari, Bernd Magnus, and (maybe?) R.J. Hollingdale all raised important doubts about the canonical status of the Nachlass material in the 1970s and 1980s. On the standard narrative, it appears Nietzsche wanted much of this
material destroyed, and it was only the intervention of others, independent of
Nietzsche, that resulted in the material being saved for posterity.More recently, Julian Young (in his 2010 biography:539-542) confirmed and documented
Nietzsche’s abandonment of a project organized under the rubric Will to Power in favor of one organized
around the idea of a Revaluation of All
Values.

Unsurprisingly, commentators committed to
the centrality of “will to power” to Nietzsche’s thought have tried to resist
this evidence.Paul Katsafanas, for
example, admits in his 2013 book that “if Nietzsche consigned so many of his writings on
will to power to the wastebasket, he can hardly have regarded those notes as
important,” but then claimed, surprisingly, that this “story [the familiar narrative] is apocryphal” (2013:248), relying only on Hollingdale, whom Katsafanas reports
says Nietzsche was only discarding the “page
proofs of Twilight of the Idols”
(2013:248).

It appears, however, Katsafanas did not
consult the original German source for the story, namely, Carl Albrecht
Bernoulli’s Franz Overbeck und Friedrich
Nietzsche:Eine Freundschaft
(1908). The text is a bit hard to decipher, given the font, but it does appear that Bernoulli, a student of
Overbeck’s, reported that when Nietzsche left his flat in Sils Maria
in September of 1888, he instructed his landlord Herr Durisch to “burn” his
papers and notebooks, though the landlord disregarded the instructions (1908:301).Nietzsche left for Turin a couple of weeks
later, and suffered his final mental collapse in early January of 1889.Bernoulli does not specify the exact
contents of the voluminous material Nietzsche asked to be destroyed, but Young
reports that “many” of the “693 fragments” that Nietzsche’s sister put into the
posthumous Will to Power “had in fact
been consigned to Nietzsche’s wastepaper basket in Sils, from which, for
unknown reasons, Durisch retrieved them” (Young 2010:628 n. 9).
Thus, it appears a version of the standard narrative is correct: much of what we have in the book known as The Will to Power—including its famous concluding section about will to power (as Montinari specifically documented)—represent work Nietzsche had rejected.

Thursday, May 11, 2017

I just got a very detailed report from Routledge about sales of Nietzsche on Morality as of the end of 2016. The first edition (2002) has sold not quite 6,500 copies in all formats (though over 6,000 were in paperback unsurprisingly, the rest hardback or e-books). The second edition, which just came out in 2015, has sold almost 1,100 copies in all formats (with the most, about 730, in paperback). As academic book sales go, this is pretty gratifying. Many thanks to readers here who are probably among those who have bought the book over the years and to those who have also assigned the book in their classes!

About Me

Brian Leiter is Karl N. Llewellyn Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, & Human Values at the University of Chicago. He works on a variety of topics in moral, political, and legal philosophy. His current Nietzsche-related work concerns Nietzsche's theory of agency and its intersection with recent work in empirical psychology; Nietzsche's arguments for moral skepticism; and the role of naturalism in Nietzsche's philosophy.